Huawei Unveils 10nm Kirin 970 Chipset with Dedicated NPU & Cat.18 LTE

Huawei has already confirmed to launch the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro smartphones On October 12th in Munich, Germany. At the ongoing IFA 2017, the third largest smartphone maker has unveiled its next-gen mobile processor dubbed Kirin 970 chipset. The all-new Kirin 970 chipset will be the successor to last year’s Kirin 960. With this new chipset, the company is betting big on the Artificial Intelligence (AI). The company also confirmed the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro to come powered by the Kirin 970 chipset.

The Kirin 970 comes with an octa-core CPU featuring 4x Cortex-A73 cores clocked at 2.4GHz and 4x Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.8GHz. To look after the graphics performance, it got the superior 12-core Mali-G72 GPU. Last year’s Kirin 960 processor came with an 8-core Mali-G71 GPU. The Kirin 970 processor is built using TSMC’s 10nm process and is mentioned to pack 5.5 billion transistors on a single square centimeter.

Commenting on this announcement, Richard Yu, CEO of HUAWEI Consumer Business Group, said,

“As we look to the future of smartphones, we’re at the threshold of an exciting new era. Mobile AI = On-Device AI + Cloud AI. HUAWEI is committed to developing smart devices into intelligent devices by building end-to-end capabilities that support coordinated development of chips, devices, and the cloud. The ultimate goal is to provide a significantly better user experience. The Kirin 970 is the first in a series of new advances that will bring powerful AI features to our devices and take them beyond the competition.”

Huawei’s new heterogeneous computing architecture is mentioned to deliver up to 25x the performance with 50x greater efficiency. The Kirin 970 is also first Kirin processor to come with Huawei’s mobile AI computing platform that sports a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU). The company mentioned the Kirin 970 with NPU has processed 2,000 images per minute, compared to just 97 images using the CPU.

It also supports the Cat.18 LTE that offers download speeds up to 1.2Gbps. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 and Samsung Exynos 8895 processors offer maximum download speeds up to 1Gbps. To improve the imaging capabilities, the Kirin 970 include dual ISP for motion detection and low light enhancement. It also comes with HDR10 support with 4K decoding at 60FPS and 4K encoding at 30FPS. Huawei is also making the Kirin 970 as an open platform for developers. Stay tuned on PhoneRadar for more details about the upcoming Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro smartphones.